Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Perverting Luke 15:4

Via Vox Day, news on the United Methodist Church's election of a lesbian bishop:

Karen Oliveto clutched a friend's hand, closed her eyes and wept when she learned last year she had been elected a bishop of the United Methodist Church. Oliveto, who is married to another woman, had become the denomination's first openly gay bishop.

Within minutes, a formal complaint was filed challenging her election as contrary to the church ban on clergy who are "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" - a petition that the highest Methodist judicial authorities agreed to consider. On Tuesday, the court will take up the closely watched case, the latest flashpoint over LGBT rights in a denomination splintering over the Bible and homosexuality.

Vox lays out Christianity's options starkly--maintain what is regarded as eternal truth or be converged out of existence:

Any acceptance of same-sex relationships is sufficient to not only defrock a minister or a deacon, much less a bishop, but merits immediate expulsion from the church. Any so-called "Christian" church that embraces formalized sin, of any kind, is clearly nothing of the sort. This is not even remotely debatable.

Conservatives need to understand that the infiltrators are not seeking acceptance, and that they are not misguided, but they are there to destroy the organization from within. It's not as if Christians weren't warned of these "wolves in sheep's clothing", after all.

The following graph shows the frequency of worship attendance by sexual orientation in the US (n = 178, 222, and 8,897, respectively):

If gays are so spiritually vain and fragile that they aren't involved in the church because it doesn't flatter their egos then it's obvious that they do not and will not ever take the professed truths of the church seriously.

And if the church jettisons putative fundamental truths in an effort to appeal to the fashionable cause of the day, it's obvious that the church does not take the professed truth of Christianity seriously, either.

Pandering to homosexuals--and to virtue-signalers by way of embracing homosexuality--not only makes a mockery of the putative eternal truths found in Christianity, it makes little practical sense, either.

Gays are, in addition to being small in number, are also relatively irreligious. A better explanation for why they don't visit houses of worship is that most of them don't see a point in doing so. The percentages, by sexual orientation, who are firm theists:

A denomination that caters to their need for validation will end up alienating current members. In the numbers game of community participation, it's one step forward followed by two steps backwards.

3 comments:

Sortocracy (sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them) is essential to religious freedom. If there is something that is preventing Karen Oliveto and others currently calling them "Methodists" from working within the ecclesiastical structure -- AND -- preventing them from starting another religious denomination consistent with their strongly held beliefs (which, in "comparative religious" terms can be called "social theory"), then this kind of "civil disobedience" might be understandable.

However, the US Federal government is clearly enforcing the First Amendment when it comes to religions that accept "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" to a far greater degree than it is supporting freedom of association in general. Indeed, given the Federal impositions using the 14th as a fig leaf, I have serious reservations about viewing Karen Oliveto and her supporters as deserving of _any_ human rights.